April 5, 2006
By JOSHUA BROCKMAN
WASHINGTON, April 4 — The sexual exploitation of children on the Internet is a $20 billion industry that continues to expand in the United States and abroad, overwhelming attempts by the authorities to curb its growth, witnesses said at a Congressional hearing on Tuesday.
Justin Berry, 19, testifying on child pornography before a House panel Tuesday. At 13, Mr. Berry became a victim of Internet predators. Matthew Cavanaugh/European Pressphoto Agency.
The witnesses, who testified at a hearing of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, part of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said that sexual predators were preying on victims as young as 18 months by using instant messaging and Web cameras to meet, lure and digitally stalk children and to share pornography.
Internet technologies have the capacity to drive a wedge between children and their families, they said.
“Online predators befriend adolescents,” said Dr. Sharon Cooper, a pediatrician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was one of the witnesses. “They become closer to them than some family members are.”
Dr. Cooper compared the new forms of online exploitation, which involve constant surveillance of subjects, to security cameras in convenience stores. “We’re seeing real-time sexual exploitation of children.” She cautioned that predators were using online child pornography not just for sexual gratification, but as “a plan for action.”
The lead witness at the hearings was Justin Berry, who was molested as a teenager by people he had met online, and then went on to run a pornographic Web site for five years, featuring images of himself.
Mr. Berry was the subject of a front-page article in The New York Times in December by an investigative reporter, Kurt Eichenwald. The article detailed Mr. Berry’s experiences and his efforts to assist in the prosecution of some of the 1,500 people who had paid him to perform on camera.
Mr. Eichenwald spent six months on the investigation and was subpoenaed to testify before the committee. He sat alongside Mr. Berry, 19, who delivered his remarks in a measured tone to the committee.
“There are hundreds of kids in the United States alone who are right now wrapped up in this horror,” Mr. Berry said in his testimony. “Within each of your Congressional districts, I guarantee there are children who have used their Webcams to appear naked online, and I guarantee you there are also children in your district on the Internet right now being contacted and seduced by online sexual predators.”
Child exploitation investigators in the Justice Department came under fire from lawmakers at the hearings, who questioned whether officials had responded too slowly to leads provided by Mr. Berry. These included clients’ names and credit card numbers, which could presumably help investigators identify children entangled in the online pornography industry. The department denied that contention.
“The Department of Justice uses every resource available to quickly protect and remove children who are being exploited from dangerous situations, and to prosecute those responsible for their abuse,” a spokesman, Bryan Sierra, said.
The hearing was the first of several on this topic. On Thursday, the committee is to address law enforcement efforts. A representative from the Justice Department is expected to testify.
“Justin Berry stepped forward at a time the government did not know he existed,” Mr. Eichenwald said. “He is, to experts’ knowledge, the first such teenage witness to ever turn over this kind of vast evidence to the government.”
Still, he added, “important data offered to the government by Justin has, even at this late date, not been collected and has only been reviewed by me.”
At issue is how to handle the companies involved in these crimes, from Internet service providers to credit card companies to banks.
“At a minimum what we can do is follow the money,” said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “If we take away the profitability, it is going to be very difficult for these sites to maintain themselves.”
U.S. Official Is Arrested
MIAMI, April 4 (AP) — The deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security was arrested on Tuesday and accused of using the Internet to seduce someone he thought was a teenage girl, the authorities said.
According to the sheriff’s office in Polk County, Fla., where the charges were issued, the official, Brian J. Doyle, 55, of Silver Spring, Md., had a sexually explicit conversation with a person he believed was a 14-year-old girl whose profile he had seen on the Internet. In reality, the sheriff’s office said, Mr. Doyle was talking with an undercover sheriff’s detective.
Read original article, which appeared in Section A on p. 20.
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